An Interview with Robert Young of the Gerontology Research Group
Here one of the long-standing core members of the Gerontology Research Group (GRG) is interviewed. This volunteer organization maintains and validates records of supercentenarians, those rare individuals who live past 110, and also runs one of the few online watering holes for the aging research community. Unfortunately, the interviewer is overly flippant on the topic of aging and longevity, but that can be skipped in favor of the more interesting portions of the interview:
What's the goal of the GRG? Do you want to live forever?
So basically at the moment it has two main departments. One is run by the succes...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 23, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, May 9th 2016
This report is comprehensive and interested readers are encouraged to review. The authors provided projections on organ donation and transplantation rates, quality-adjusted life years and life years saved, health risks to patients, living organ donation, cross-border exchange, and health inequalities. Their most favorable scenario projected health benefits including transplanting up to 21,000 more organs annually in the EU, which would save 230,000 life years or gain 219,000 quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). For social impacts, it was predicted that increasing organ transplantation will have a positive effect on quality...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 8, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Overfund the Life Insurance Policy that Pays for Your Cryopreservation
The small, forty-year-old cryonics industry offers indefinite low-temperature storage of at least your brain following death. In a well-organized cryopreservation, the medical team is right there when you die, and cooldown and infusion with cryoprotectant solution can begin immediately. The result is vitrification of tissue, especially brain tissue, to preserve the fine structure that stores the data of the mind. Then you wait, suspended, in liquid nitrogen in a dewar vessel, heading for an uncertain future in which the possibility of restoration exists. That possibility is what you are paying for, and it is the single mos...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 7, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Of Interest Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, May 2nd 2016
This study is the first CAR T-cell trial to infuse patients with an even mixture of two types of T cells (helper and killer cells, which work together to kill cancer). With the assurance that each patient gets the same mixture of cells, the researchers were able to come to conclusions about the effects of administering different doses of cells.
In 27 of 29 participants whose responses were evaluated a few weeks after the infusion, a high-sensitivity test could detect no trace of their cancer in their bone marrow. The CAR T cells eliminated cancers anywhere in the body they appeared. Of the two participants who did n...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 1, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Another Example of Cryonics in the Popular Press
Here is a recent example of the more respectful treatment the cryonics industry receives in the popular press these days, though, as ever, the very important differences between freezing and vitrification in terms of their effects on tissues are skipped over. Cryonics providers don't freeze people, they vitrify them, as this offers a greatly improved preservation of fine structures, such as those in the brain that store the data of the mind. Improved methods of vitrification of tissue, with the aim of making it reversible, are in fact under active development by a range of research groups. The goal is use in the tissue eng...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 27, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Dealing with Complexity
The two things I’ve spent the most time studying are software engineering and music composition. While they seem to be very different fields of study, large-scale works in either area rely on one very important common skill: the ability to manage complexity.
In software, you know that your complexity is out of control when it becomes harder and harder to make changes as the size of the code base grows. In music, complexity is out of control when your piece becomes less and less coherent as it grows in length and instrumentation.
It wouldn’t surprise me if other fields are similar. Once you get the basic skills...
Source: Productivity501 - April 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Mark Shead Tags: Misc Source Type: blogs
Medical update: It’s all good
While showing me a graph, with the trajectory of my health over the past few months, my endocrinologist remarked, “I wouldn’t have sold you life insurance in January!” Point taken. It was a rough patch, to be sure. But now… CD-4 count: 400 (the same level as when I was first diagnosed HIV+); up from […] (Source: My journey with AIDS)
Source: My journey with AIDS - April 1, 2016 Category: Infectious Diseases Authors: Kenn Tags: AIDS and HIV CD-4 medical update mental health type-II diabetes viral load Source Type: blogs
Medical update: It ’ s all good
While showing me a graph, with the trajectory of my health over the past few months, my endocrinologist remarked, “I wouldn’t have sold you life insurance in January!” Point taken. It was a rough patch, to be sure. But now… CD-4 count: 400 (the same level as when I was first diagnosed HIV+); up from […] (Source: My journey with AIDS)
Source: My journey with AIDS - April 1, 2016 Category: Infectious Diseases Authors: Kenn Tags: AIDS and HIV CD-4 medical update mental health type-II diabetes viral load Source Type: blogs
The Nitty-Gritty of Fed Rate Hikes
For the past two or more years the question of whether or not (and when) the Fed might “raise interest rates” has been a constant feature in the news. With the FOMC, the Fed’s rate setting body, meeting next week, this is especially true at the moment. But no one seems to understand the nitty-gritty of just how interest rates are raised (or lowered), and very few non-economists have any knowledge of how it happens.
At times, the news reports seem to suggest that somewhere within the bowels of the New York Fed there is an interest-rate-machine, and that the monetary authorities have only to push a button, and, Voila!,...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - October 24, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Richard H. Timberlake Jr. Source Type: blogs
Cryonics is Still the Only Viable Backup Plan
Front and center, the primary plan for longevity for people in middle age and younger today is to help push through enough of the right medical research. Your body is aging, accumulating damage, but methods of repairing that damage are slowly edging their way towards clinical application. Once in the clinic they will slowly become better. At some point the improvement in repair methodologies will add healthy life expectancy for older people faster than a year with every passing chronological year. Everyone with access to the latest stable medical technology at that point will have beaten the curve: they will no longer suff...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 12, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs
Ask D'Mine: On the Medifast Diet, and Life Insurance Woes
Happy Saturday, and welcome back to our weekly advice column, Ask D'Mine, hosted by veteran type 1, diabetes author and educator Wil Dubois. This week, Wil responds to two quite opposite questions -- one on those packaged diets that purport to he... (Source: Diabetes Mine)
Source: Diabetes Mine - September 26, 2015 Category: Endocrinology Authors: Wil Dubois Source Type: blogs
Obamacare’s Not-So-Hidden Tax: Thank You for Smoking
Without government interference, insurance markets will naturally charge higher premiums for riskier individuals. For example, life insurance premiums vary considerably based on factors that increase the likelihood of death, such as age, gender, smoking status, and health.
Under Obamacare, many factors that influence healthcare expenditures are excluded from premiums. For example, premiums make no distinction for obesity, likelihood of having a baby, alcoholism or pre-existing conditions. One notable exception is for smokers, where premiums may be up to 50 percent higher than that for non-smokers. I have collected data on ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 17, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Aaron Yelowitz Source Type: blogs
Value-based Interoperability: Less is more
By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE
Interoperability in health care is all the rage now. After publishing a ten year interoperability plan, which according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is well positioned to protect us from wanton market competition and heretic innovations, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) published the obligatory J’accuse report on information blocking, chockfull of vague anecdotal innuendos and not much else. Nowadays, every health care conversation with every expert, every representative, every lobbyist and every stakeholder, is bound to turn to the lame...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 18, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Tech THCB Source Type: blogs
Predicted Future Life Expectancy Continues to Increase
Predicting human life expectancy in the decades ahead is a big business, as the vast pension and life insurance industries rely upon these forecasts. If the forecasts are dramatically wrong, and they will be just as soon as any significant advances in rejuvenation biotechnology reach the clinic, then financial upheaval lies ahead for all of the counterparties, insurers, and governments who bet against larger than expected increases in human life. The actuarial profession pays attention to the state of medical research aimed at intervention in the aging process, and the more mainstream treatment of age-related disease, and ...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 30, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
